I'm Anderson Cooper. Welcome to the 360 podcast.

Surviving in train repellent. A woman's amazing story and a kids one of crash victims remember the dead they lost. Let's get started.

M. works in Midtown Manhattan. She's on her way to work yesterday morning before you meet her. I just wanna show you this. This was just the car she was in its side. There's a rows of seats on the left and the right. The carry on reck and the roof of the car. That's what Amanda walked out of. She joins us now. First of all, I'm surprised you are OK. First, how you open up be there?

"Physically, I am relatively unscate and unbelievably so. Emotionally, I probably need a little time to sort that out."

"Does it feel real?"

"It's getting more real. The more I hear, the more I see on the news. Because clearly being inside the train, I have no idea the gravity of the situation. When I took those photos, I had no idea that I would show them to anybody. I have no idea they would get me to a point like this. I only took these pictures just to text to a coworker saying: Hey, I'm not coming to work today. I did not realize this is gonna to become a news, a national news. Anything that was gonna leave New York, it didn't seem I was too uninjured for it to seem that big of a deal in the moment."

"So, you were...you were sleeping on the train?"

"I was nodding off and the thing that woke me up was my own equilibrium. I realized that my body was tilted very severely and that woke me up. And when I woke up and saw that the entire cab of the train was tilted. I immediately woke up and realized that I was in the middle of the train crash. I got on that train."

"I mean when you woke up was the train off the tracks or where?"

"The train was tilted to the left against the water, the opposite side toward the land. And then...after...I don't...I don't...I'm not an engineer and I don't fully understand but whatever tort it through back to the right hand side towards the water. So, those of us in the car that I was in kind of did a loop around, like from the wall to the ceiling to the landing on the side."

"So, were you thrown off your seat or what you did?"

"Well, I...I stood up from a seat where I had kept my belongings in my hand but my work uniform was where I was sitting was seats behind me. I wound up in a completely different part of the train than I was originally sitting. Yeah, it was...it happened very fast but it also very much happened in the low motion."

"Really?"

"I was complete..."

"It's like a slow motion?"

"I was completely aware the entire time. As soon as I realized what was going on, I had my phone in my hand. I had my headphone in which prevented me from hearing anything earlier on and I realized that I was gonna need this phone because I was not going to allow myself get hurt and I was gonna to have to call 911 when this is over and I was gonna to have called my mom and dad. And that was going through my head, so I grabbed my phone. I loose my purse around my arm and I just made the conscious decision to keep my eyes open, keep my head straight, roll with the punches. Just let it happen as it was going naturally happened and when it was all settling done I would not only be alive but conscious."

"But I mean your car it was...ended up on its side?"

"I was in the 3rd car back which was one of the 2 that was completely on its side. The 2nd car being the one that unfortunately people were ejected from."

"So you were standing up and you were in a different spot than you started in because it..."

"It started off tilting to the left and then I think when the first 2 cars made whatever impact they made. The connection between the cars is what jolted it back to the other side and that's what threw everyone."